One of the ways we can understand ourselves better is to look at the metaphors our culture uses. Medieval and ancient peoples drew their comparisons from nature. Today we often look at things in terms of machines or computers. We tell our unmotivated children they need to “get it in gear.” When we forget something […]
Mortimer Adler was one of the great contemporary classical thinkers. He was best known for his involvement in the Great Books movement, and more particularly for his editorship of Encyclopedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World series in the 1950s and 1960s. He became the chairman of the board of editors of Encyclopedia Britannica […]
Every subject that is systematic has a certain inherent order to it that dictates how it should be approached. In some subjects this order is more explicit than others. In mathematics, for example, there is a widely acknowledged sequence in terms of what should be learned and when it should be taught. In other subjects, […]
When I was eight years old, my parents bought me a bicycle for Christmas. It wasn’t anything like my old bicycle, which had only one gear; my new bicycle had five. I couldn’t have told you then why five gears were better than one. To me it was like five pancakes being better than one […]
The Founding Fathers were of varying backgrounds and disparate political beliefs, but they shared two characteristics that distinguished them from other men of their time—and from most men of any time: wisdom and virtue. And it is for this reason, beyond just wanting to become familiar with who they were and what they did, that […]
A couple of summers ago I was part of a panel of classical educators discussing the importance of our Western heritage and the obligation we have of passing it on through the education of our children. The audience of homeschool parents listened attentively, and those of us on the panel answered questions from the audience. […]
If I see my logic program listed in the math section of a catalog one more time, I’m going to—well, I’m not entirely sure what I’ll do, but it will probably be illogical. Not that the people who make these catalogs are trying to make me mad, I’m sure. They’re just trying to sell my […]
In Eleanor Farjeon’s The Little Bookroom, there is a fairy tale called “The Giant and the Mite.” It is the story of something so big that it cannot be comprehended—and of something too small to be comprehended. The size of the Giant was the first problem: There was once a Giant who was too big […]
Most of us don’t think much about angels, at least not in any serious way. Even in religious discussions involving the role of angels in the doings of the world and the purposes of heaven, angels play a very marginal role. But there is one occasion when angels are very much on our minds, and […]
We live in an age of slogans and buzzwords, and their number is ever-increasing thanks to a shorter news cycle and access to instant media. It used to be that a slogan would last awhile, partly because we didn’t hear it all the time. But now, someone comes up with a slogan and we hear […]